Theopedia

Jesus Seminar

The Jesus Seminar is a group of New Testament scholars, founded and long directed by Robert Funk, that uses historical-critical methods to judge which sayings and deeds the Gospels attribute to Jesus actually originated with him. Its flagship publication put the project’s question in its own title, asking what Jesus “really said.”1 Funk also called for revising the New Testament canon itself, urging scholars to “seize the opportunity to revamp and revise” and produce “a new New Testament, indeed, a new Bible.”2 The Seminar’s published conclusions deny Scripture’s inspiration and reliability, and with them the church’s historic teaching about Christ’s person and resurrection.

Historical Origin

The Jesus Seminar continues a lineage of historical-critical Jesus scholarship that Craig Carter traces from Spinoza’s seventeenth-century historical criticism, through Enlightenment higher criticism, to Rudolf Bultmann’s twentieth-century program of demythologizing the Gospels.3 Within the “quest for the historical Jesus” specifically, the Seminar stands on one side of a division that opened near the turn of the twentieth century between William Wrede, who read Jesus as a non-apocalyptic Galilean prophet whose apocalyptic sayings were the later church’s own theological composition, and Albert Schweitzer, who argued Jesus’s own teaching was thoroughly apocalyptic. Stephen Witmer identifies the Jesus Seminar as “the modern heir of Wrede’s project.”4 Funk organized panels of scholars to assess which Gospel sayings and deeds could be attributed to the historical Jesus, publishing the results as The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? in 1993.1

Core Tenets

The Seminar’s method belongs to a broader family of “criteria of authenticity” that historical-Jesus scholarship has used to sift the Gospels for material judged to go back to Jesus himself, commonly including independent attestation, dissimilarity from both Judaism and the early church, and contextual credibility.5 Michael Kruger notes these criteria “have been roundly critiqued by evangelical scholars,” pointing to Darrell Bock’s essay on the subject as one example.5

Funk did not confine this reconstructive project to the Gospels’ content. In his essay “The Once and Future New Testament,” he argued that developments in modern biblical scholarship had “opened the door to a reconsideration of what ancient documents the Christian Scriptures ought to contain,” and that “it will be a great tragedy if we do not seize the opportunity to revamp and revise.”2 The same essay argued that the earliest Christian movement had an inherent “aversion to writing” that “persisted…well into the second century,”6 a claim Kruger treats as part of a broader “extrinsic model” that reads the delay and diversity of the written apostolic tradition as evidence against an early, stable canon.

Even a scholar sympathetic to the Seminar’s project has registered its instability. J. D. Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founding member, conceded that the “stunning diversity” of conclusions reached by historical-Jesus scholarship generally is “an academic embarrassment,” adding that “it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”7

Confessional and Biblical Response

The 1689 London Baptist Confession states that Scripture “is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,” given “by the inspiration of God,” and that its authority “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God…the author thereof.”8 The Old and New Testaments in their original languages, the confession adds, were “immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages.”9 Funk’s call to “revamp and revise” the canon into “a new Bible” places a modern scholarly guild, rather than God, as the standard by which Scripture’s contents are set, which the confession’s doctrine of Scripture rules out on its own terms.

Kruger’s broader critique of “criteria of canonicity” models applies to the Seminar’s method as well: subjecting the New Testament’s reliability to a supposedly neutral historical methodology does not actually escape worldview commitments, since “there is no religiously neutral approach to historical study” because “there is no religiously neutral approach to anything.”10 A method built to judge Jesus’s words and deeds by criteria external to Scripture’s own testimony about itself cannot, on this analysis, yield a verdict more reliable than the assumptions built into the criteria themselves.

Against the Seminar’s denial of Christ’s deity and virgin birth, the confession states that “the Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, being very and eternal God…did…take upon him man’s nature…being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary” (Matt. 1:20-23; Luke 1:34-35; John 1:1, 14).11 Against the denial of a bodily resurrection, the confession states that Christ “on the third day…arose from the dead with the same body in which he suffered” (Luke 24:39; John 20:27; 1 Cor. 15:3-8).12

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), “Introduction,” citing Robert W. Funk, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (New York: Polebridge, 1993). ↩ ↩2

  2. Robert W. Funk, “The Once and Future New Testament,” in The Canon Debate, ed. Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 555, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, “Introduction.” ↩ ↩2

  3. Craig A. Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). ↩

  4. Stephen Witmer, “Keeping Eschatology and Ethics Together: The Teaching of Jesus, the Work of Albert Schweitzer, and the Task of Evangelical Pastor-Theologians,” Themelios 39, no. 3 (2014): 484-500, n.7. ↩

  5. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 2, “Tracing the Origins,” n.49, citing Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 85-101, and Darrell L. Bock, “The Words of Jesus in the Gospels: Live, Jive, or Memorex?,” in Jesus Under Fire, ed. Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 74-99. ↩ ↩2

  6. Robert W. Funk, “The Once and Future New Testament,” in The Canon Debate, 544, quoted in Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 3, “The Writing of Canon,” n.3. ↩

  7. J. D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), xxviii, quoted in Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 2, “Tracing the Origins,” n.30. ↩

  8. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  9. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 8. ↩

  10. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 2, “Tracing the Origins,” citing Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 94-95. ↩

  11. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩

  12. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 4. ↩